Traditionally, individual investors have relied upon printed media such as newspapers and magazines to gather financial data for use in making investment decisions as to financial instruments such as stocks, mutual funds, bonds, commodities, indexes, currencies and their derivatives. For example, newspapers often list the results from the most recent trading day for stocks and mutual funds. Individuals consult such printed media and make investment decisions based in part on the information found therein.
The information that is available via print media is limited, however, in several respects. For example, the type and number of statistics that are provided is small and non-customizable. It is common, for example, that printed media list the closing price of a financial instrument along with an indication of how the financial instrument fared in the most recent day of trading. However, there are numerous other financial data items regarding financial instruments that an investor may wish to review in order to make buy and sell decisions. Because the desired data items are not available, an investor may need to make laborious data calculations him or herself, or simply go without the set of desired investment data and make investment decisions with less than the optimal level of information.
The financial data that is available from printed media is also limited in that the information is often stale or out-of-date. The value of stocks, bonds, options, and other financial instruments fluctuate throughout the trading day, making certain transactions that an investor may be considering more or less attractive. However, these fluctuations are not reflected in a print media source that lists only the values at the close of the market. Thus, the financial data gathered through print media is often out-of-date, even if it contains data from the previous day of trading.
Furthermore, the financial data that is available through printed media is limited in that it cannot be sorted and searched automatically. For example, if an investor wishes to identify all stocks with a particular characteristic such as, for example, a price under $100, the investor needs to scan the printed media by hand and note for him or herself which stocks satisfy the investor's criteria. Such a process is cumbersome and subject to human error.
Automated systems have been developed to address shortcomings in the information provided by printed media. Generally, existing automated systems provide access to timely financial data. The data may be updated at short intervals and in some instances may be updated in near real-time. However, existing automated systems have failed to provide many existing needs of non institutional investors. For example, the statistics that are provided by existing on-line systems, as was the case with printed media, are limited and do not provide the breadth of data items that investors may desire in order to make informed decisions. Existing on-line systems have also failed to provide non-institutional investors the capability to format complex searches for sophisticated investment strategies such as stock option spreads that involve positions in multiple instruments. Existing systems likewise lack functionality to assist novice users in developing complex searches for such sophisticated option strategies. Furthermore, existing systems lack the capability to automatically execute trades of sophisticated investment strategies such as an option spreads that involve a plurality of instruments.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for improved on-line systems for analyzing financial instrument data. Specifically, there is a need for systems and methods for collecting financial data from multiple sources, calculating values for a broad set of searchable investment parameters related to sophisticated investment strategies such as derivatives, and servicing requests for user-defined searches of the searchable investment parameters. There is similarly a need for systems and methods that assist users in generating searches and which automatically execute trades of sophisticated investment strategies upon user request.